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Saturday, November 29, 2014

A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the arguments of a home invasion killer on death row who complained that the food he is being served in prison is not kosher. Steven Hayes, convicted of killing a mother and two daughters, sued the Department of Correction in August 2014, alleging the preparation practices for kosher meals in the kitchen at the state's highest-security prison do not conform to Jewish dietary laws.

Hayes describes himself in the lawsuit as an Orthodox Jew and says he's been requesting a kosher diet since May 2013. He says he has suffered "almost two years of emotional injury from having to choose between following God and starving or choosing to survive. [What life and death choice did this cold-blooded killer give his three victims?]…

The judge noted that Hayes is offered kosher meals, and the state Department of Correction has two rabbis who periodically monitor the preparation of kosher foods in the prison system. The judge said both rabbis certified that the food and the food preparation process comply with dietary laws. "Although Hayes raises as an issue regarding the lack of a reliable orthodox certificate or an onsite Jewish overseer, he provides no evidence suggesting that this leads to a finding that the meals are not kosher," the judge wrote….

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Tall tales are a highly specialized form of children's book humor. You need to be awfully good, for the classic tales you compete with are superb. Take Jim Bridger who discovered that it took eight hours for an echo to return from a distant mountain. He turned it into an alarm clock by shouting "wake up!" before he went to bed.

Sid Fleischman in The ABC's of Writing For Children, edited by Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff, 2003

A New Orleans' city inspector general's report claims that five police detectives failed to do substantial investigation of more than 1,000 cases of sex crimes and child abuse--with one detective being cited for stating a belief that rape should not be considered a crime. The report, released on November 12, 2014, examined the detectives' work between January 2011 and December 2013. It found the detectives filed follow-up reports [the first report after the complaint] for only 179 of 1,290 sex crime cases. In particular, the report found that some cases of potentially abused children and rape victims went completely without investigation.

Police officials said the detectives were transferred to patrol duty and were under further investigation. The police also said two supervisors who oversaw the detectives have been transferred…

The U.S. Department of Justice previously investigated the scandal-plagued police force and in 2012 the city agreed to a host of changes in policies. Among the federal probe's major findings were that the police force was rife with corruption and had numerous instances of excessive use of deadly force, discrimination and problems with its sex crimes unit. A federal monitor is overseeing compliance.

The latest city report charged that a detective handling child abuse failed to investigate a case involving a 3-year-old brought to an emergency room due to an alleged sexual assault, closing the case without any charges even though the child had a sexually transmitted disease. The same detective closed with book with minimal or no investigation, and again with no charges, on two cases involving children brought to the emergency room with fractured skulls…

Two detectives stood accused of writing six reports on the same day in 2013--to make it appear they had done follow-up reports years before to the old cases…In fact, these documents were written only after inspectors asked for the missing reports…

Short stories are gratifying and fun and not the kind of heavy lifting involved with a novel. I used to frequently write them in one sitting. Now it's usually several days. Whatever it is, it's a cheap investment in time. Plus, you can take the amount of chances you can't with a novel because if you waste three days, what do you care?

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

The historian frames a cosmos of happenings in which men are included only as event producers or event sufferers. The biographer explores the cosmos of a single being. History deals in generalizations about a time. Biography deals in the particulars of one person's life.

It is sometimes fashionable to dismiss the short story and to attribute its apparent decline to the greater versatility of the novel and to the rise of nonfiction. But the trouble does not lie with the form but with the practitioners. A really good short story writer will always find an audience. J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and John Updike have been remarkably successful, and the reason is that they are all masters of the form. They all have a good ear and eye for detail.

When you have a first novel [Fear of Flying] that sells 6 million copies, anything you do after it has to be a disappointment. You set a standard that you cannot compete with, and the pressure it puts on you is almost unreal.

Monday, November 24, 2014

Humor can either be a genre in its own right, or an important ingredient in many other genres. Shakespeare wrote comedies, tragedies, and romances. Even in the most tragic of his tales, he knew the importance of inserting a humorous scene every so often to bring the audience some comic relief from all the death, deceit, and unrequited love in the rest of the play. While joke writing is a subsection of the genre, and a potentially lucrative one, it would be a mistake to confuse the ability to tell a joke with the ability to write humor.

A Connecticut man was charged on November 11, 2014 with the death of his 15-month-old son, who died this summer after he was left in a hot car for hours…Kyle Steitz, 36, turned himself in to police and was charged with criminally negligent homicide over his son Benjamin's death…The authorities released Seitz on his promise to appear in court the next day…

Benjamin Seitz died of "hyperthermia due to environmental exposure" on July 7, 2014 after being left alone in a hot car by his father. The state medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. The temperature in the car reached 88 degrees that day, according to a report issued by Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut.

Seitz was supposed to take his son to day care that morning but instead he drove to his job at a technology company and accidentally left the boy in the car until realizing he had forgotten about him….

"Connecticut Man Charged in Death of Boy Left in Hot Car," wtaqnews.com, November 12, 2014

Sunday, November 23, 2014

The dangers of biography are inaccuracy and hero worship. The biographer needs to cultivate an objective eye that fits his subject into the world with compassion. Most biographers treat their subjects as one of three things: an example, a victim, or a source of wisdom.

The average amount of student debt per borrower in 2013, according to a study released on November 13, 2014 by the Institute for College Access and Success's Project on Student Debt, is $28,400…Matthew Reed, who directed the study, said the report aims to analyze increasing student debt averages for graduates with a bachelor's degree at a time when the cost of higher education is rising…

"Debt varies from state to state and college-to-college so where you go to school can make a difference," Reed said. "It's something that prospective students should take a look at…Federal student loans come with protections such as fixed interest rates for the life of the loan, income based repayment programs, and public service loan forgiveness," Reed said. "These are not always available for private loans. Private loans are not a form of financial aid. They often have variable rates, and they do not have customer protections."…

Kevin Long, a professor of economics at Boston University, said the rising averages of student debt is related to a combination of both poor labor market forces and increasing tuition costs….

I don't wholly agree with the label "romance." It is for me chiefly a marketing label, not a creative one. When Kathleen Woodiwiss and Margaret Mitchell were penning their first books, they weren't writing "romance." They were writing from their hearts like any other writer. Publishing labeled the books "romance." Publishing, in trying to imitate the success of these books, had superimposed rules and defined a genre. The best "romance writers" write from their hearts and break "rules" all over the place.

Criticism is the only antidote that human beings have discovered against error. It is the chief method that a skilled person can use to become even better. The key to discovering correctable errors before you commit a work to press.

But criticism hurts. A deep and pervasive flaw in human character makes all of us resistant to the one thing that can help us do better. The only solution? Learn to grow up. To hold your head high, develop a thick skin, and take it.

If a reader didn't like your work, that may be a matter of taste. But if she did not understand the work--or was bored--that's your fault as a writer, pure and simple.

David Brin in How I Got Published, edited by Ray White and Duane Lindsay, 2007

Saturday, November 22, 2014

As a teenager, Myron May didn't get along with his parents. In 1999 he moved from Ohio to the Florida panhandle where he took up residence in the rural town of Wewahitchka with his grandmother. After graduating from high school, May enrolled at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He graduated from the university in 2005.

In 2009, Myron May was granted a law degree from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. For the next three years he practiced law in that state.

On January 18, 2014, May accepted a position as junior prosecutor in the district attorney's office in Las Cruces, New Mexico. According to District Attorney Mark D'Antonio, the 31-year-old did a good job and was well-liked by his colleagues. But on October 6, 2014, May abruptly resigned. It was about this time he began to exhibit the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

May's former girlfriend, Danielle Nixon, called the police after he came to her house uninvited with news that government agents were bugging his dwelling and his car. In a journal he kept, May wrote about his fear of being a target of government surveillance. His Facebook page contained messages regarding government agents who were spying on him by reading his mind.

In early November 2014, May moved back to Tallahassee where an old friend let him stay in a guest house.Troubled by financial issues and mental illness, May said he planned to take the Florida bar examine in February 2015.

At twelve-thirty in the morning of Thursday November 20, 2014, Myron May showed up on the FSU campus armed with a .380-caliber pistol. He walked into the lobby of Stozier Library that was packed with students studying for their upcoming final exams.

In the library lobby, May opened fire wounding two students and a university employee. Students in the library proper heard the gunshots and called 911. The scene was one of chaos with 450 students taking cover.

After the shooting spree, May stepped out of the building to reload. It was there he encountered officers with the Florida State Police and members of the Tallahassee Police Department who ordered him to drop his weapon. May shot at the officers who returned fire, killing him on the spot.

One of the students May shot was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition. The five police officers involved in the exchange of gunfire were placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

Category romances are marketed monthly under imprints readers have learned to associate with romance. Each book bearing the same imprint carries a distinctive cover design its readers recognize. To reduce costs, all books in the line have a fixed page length. Once printed, they are marketed in a block. Single-title romance novels are not part of a category line, their page length is not fixed, and each is sold on an individual basis.

One respect in which modern biography resembles fiction is its fascination with its subjects' sexual lives. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was the literary genre above all others to which readers turned for the representation of sexuality. Biography restricted itself to the public lives of its subjects--or, insofar as it dealt with their private lives, did not intrude into the bedroom.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Beauty queen Maria Jose Alvarado, as Miss Honduras, represented a country that has the world's highest murder rate for a place not at war. From 2005 to 2013, the murder of Honduran woman and girls increased by 263 percent. The 19-year-old university student resided in Teguigalpa, the Honduran capital. She had been participating in beauty pageants since she was a young girl.

In Latin America, where beauty pageants are popular, winners often become celebrities and TV personalities. While Alvarado hoped to become a diplomat after graduating from the university, she worked as a model on the popular Honduran television game show "X-O Da Dinero." In her spare time she played volleyball and football (soccer).

On the night of November 13, 2014, Maria Alvarado was at a resort/spa outside of Santa Barbara, a city 240 miles west of her home. She was there to attend a birthday party for her sister's boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz.

That night, after the party, Alvarado, her 23-year-old sister Sofia Trinidad Alvarado, and Plutarco were seen getting into a champagne colored car.

The next day, when Maria failed to board a plane for London to participate in the early rounds of the 120-contestant Miss World pageant, she and her sister were reported missing.

On Tuesday November 18, 2014, officers with the Honduran National Bureau of Investigation arrested Sofia Alvarado's boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz. Pursuant to the arrest, the officers seized a champagne colored car and a pickup truck. They also recovered a .45-caliber pistol.

Under police interrogation, Ruiz confessed to murdering his girlfriend and her sister, the beauty queen. After he and the women left the party, Ruiz and Sofia got into a heated argument regarding the fact she had been dancing with another man. At some point, out of a jealous rage, Plutarco pulled the .45-caliber handgun and shot her in the head. He shot Maria twice in the back as she tried to flee the scene.

Ruiz and an accomplice loaded the two corpses onto the back of a pickup truck and hauled them to a remote spot along the banks of the Aguagual River near the town of Arada 25 miles from Santa Barbara.

On Wednesday November 19, 2014, police officers recovered the bodies lying on top of each other in a shallow grave near the river. Maria Alvarado was wrapped in a brown plastic sheet.

Officers with the Honduras National Bureau of Investigation, on the day they arrested Ruiz, took five suspected accomplices into custody. The officers arrested Aris Maldonado Mejia, Antonio Ruiz Rodriguez, Ventura Diaz, Elizabeth Diaz, and Irma Nicolle.

A Citrus County, Florida deputy is on administrative leave after he fatally shot a woman who pointed a Taser at him during a disturbance call in Inverness late Sunday night November 16, 2014…The sheriff's deputy shot 46-year-old Dawn Renee Cameron following a struggle after receiving a call in Inverness. A witness told deputies that Cameron attempted to light a truck on fire then left the scene.

Once the deputy encountered Cameron at the entrance to a park, she attacked him, removing his Taser that she then pointed at the officer. That's when the deputry shot her. Cameron was pronounced dead at a local hospital shortly after midnight…

Jail records show that Cameron was arrested in June 2014 on a parole violation related to a previous grand theft case. Authorities have launched an investigation into the police-involved shooting.

Unlike most novels, great short stories make us marvel at their integrity, their economy. If we went at them with our red pencils, we might find we had nothing to do. We would discover there was nothing that the story could afford to lose without the whole delicate structure collapsing like a souffle or meringue. And yet we are left with a feeling of completeness, a conviction that we know exactly as much as we need to know, that all of our questions have been answered.

Francine Prose in On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey, 2000

In general, a biography has to have a theme, and its subject has to fit into the context of the times the subject lived in. More than that, the subject of a biography should also be a symbol of some sort or the spirit of his or her age. The book should bring out some thematic element of that culture. Broadly, a good biography is one that illuminates and shows the times as much as the person.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Bill Cosby, married to his wife Camille for 50 years, is one of the most recognizable comedians in the world. A graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia where he starred in track, the 77-year-old still resides in eastern Pennsylvania. When the former TV star began criticizing certain aspects of black culture a few years ago, he became a somewhat controversial figure. While conservatives generally considered him a courageous speaker of the truth, many liberals and members of the black community considered him a traitor to his race.

In November 2014, Mr. Cosby's good name and wholesome image came under public attack in connection with allegations of past behavior that violently clashed with his longstanding public persona. On November 16, 2014, 64-year-old Joan Tarshis told a CNN interviewer that Cosby, in 1969 when she was nineteen, knocked her out with a drugged drink and raped her.

Tarshis said she met Bill Cosby in 1969 over lunch in Los Angeles. She accompanied him back to his bungalow on the set of "The Bill Cosby Show" to work on some comedy routines. After she drank a bloody mary he had mixed for her, she passed out. She awoke to find him removing her underwear. In an effort to avoid being sexually assaulted, she told him she had an infection that he'd pass on to his wife. Instead of raping her, Cosby allegedly forced her to give him oral sex. She did not tell anyone, not even her mother, about what had happened to her.

Cosby later called Tarshis at her home in New York to invite her to watch him perform at The Theater at Westbury. She accepted drinks at Cosby's hotel and in his limousine before the performance. While at the theater she began to feel drugged. She asked the chauffeur to take her home in the limo where she passed out. The next morning, Tarshis woke up naked in a hotel bed next to Cosby.

Out of "guilt and shame," Tarshis did not reveal that Cosby had sexually assaulted her for the second time. She didn't think that anyone would take her word over a man revered as America's dad.

On Saturday November 16, 2014, Scott Simon, in an interview on NPR, repeatedly asked Cosby if the rape allegations were true. Each time Cosby simply shook his head, no.

The Cosby rape allegation scandal intensified the next day when a reporter with Village Voice wrote about a comedy routine on a 1969 Cosby album involving "Spanish Fly," a drug that supposedly made women beg for sex. As part of the comedy bit, Cosby joked that when he visited Spain he tried to acquire the drug.

Janice Dickinson, the 59-year-old former supermodel, sat for an interview conducted by "Entertainment Tonight" co-host Kevin Frazier that aired on November 18, 2014. According to Dickinson, Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted her in 1982 after they had dinner in Lake Tahoe. He had invited her there to open a show for him. After dinner at his hotel, he gave her a pill and a glass of red wine. She passed out. "The last thing I remember," she said, "was Bill Cosby in a patchwork robe, dropping his robe and getting on top of me."

Dickinson told the "Entertainment Tonight" interviewer that she wanted to expose Cosby in her 2002 memoir, No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel. The publisher, however, got cold feet when Cosby and his lawyers threatened a lawsuit.

Cosby's lawyer, Martin Singer, in a letter to the Associated Press, claimed that Dickinson's allegations were "false and outlandish." According to the lawyer, she contradicted her story in her memoir where she described stopping at Cosby's hotel room door after they had dinner. When she declined to enter the room, he said, "After all I've done for you, this is what I get."

On November 19, 2014, a detailed and damaging article about Bill Cosby and another alleged rape victim, 41-year-old Andrea Constland, came out in the Internet publication, Mailonline. In November 2002, the 29-year-old former Temple University basketball star met Bill Cosby. She became a regular dinner party guest at his home and considered him a mentor.

Constland, while visiting Cosby at his home in January 2004, told him she had been stressed at work. To help her relax, Cosby allegedly gave her what he called a "herbal medication." Shortly after consuming the three blue pills, she became dizzy and her knees began to shake. A little later she was unable to move her arms and legs. At that point Cosby allegedly gave Constand another drug. He led her to the sofa where she passed out. When she awoke her outer clothes and her underwear were in disarray.

Constand waited a year before reporting that Bill Cosby had raped her. She had returned to Canada, her native country. It was there she reported the assault.

Bruce Castor, the then district attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the site of the alleged rape, was informed by the Canadian authorities of Constand's allegations. He launched an investigation. In the Mailonline article, the former prosecutor lamented the fact he didn't have enough evidence to file charges against Bill Cosby. "I wanted to arrest Cosby," he said, "because I thought he was probably guilty." But being able to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt and thinking that a suspect is guilty are two different things."

Mr. Castor, in the Mailonline piece, pointed out that Constand's one-year delay in reporting the crime hurt the case. "We couldn't test for hairs, fibers, DNA and drugs that might have linked the victim to Cosby or his house."

In March 2005, Andrea Constand sued Bill Cosby for causing her "serious and deliberating injuries, mental anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, sleeplessness, anxiety, and flashbacks." The plaintiff asked for $150,000 in damages. Her attorney had rounded up thirteen other women who supposedly supported her claim that Bill Cosby was a rapist.

In 2006, Bill Cosby settled the Constand civil suit out of court. Given the damaging publicity the trial would have brought him, and the relatively small amount asked for by the plaintiff, this was not surprising. Some took this as a sign of his guilt while others simply considered it a good business decision on his part.

Shortly after the Mailonline article came out, executives at Netflix postponed Cosby's comedy special that was scheduled to air on November 28, 2014. NBC followed suit by scrapping a Bill Cosby project that was in development. TV Land cable network stopped airing reruns of "The Bill Cosby Show."

On Friday night, November 21, 2014, Cosby appeared at the Maxwell C. King Center For The Performing Arts at Eastern Florida State College in the central Florida town of Melbourne. Following his 90-minute set he received a standing ovation from an adoring audience. One of the male attendees to the show, in speaking to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, said, "If he raped all these woman, why did they not say something before?"

The University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Cosby earned his master's and doctorate in education in the 1970s, cut ties with the comedian on November 28, 2014. According to a university spokesperson, "Bill Cosby has agreed to resign as an honorary co-chasir of UMass Amherst's capital campaign. He no longer has any affiliation with the campaign nor does he serve in any other capacity at the university."

If the allegations against Bill Cosby are untrue, he has been made the victim of a terrible injustice. If they are true, his past as a serial rapist has caught up with him. In either case, the scandal is real and his reputation has been seriously and permanently damaged.

Writer's workshops around the country reflect wildly different assumptions about what the work should be, what the goals are, and how progress might be measured. Some are simply therapy sessions, attempting to create a warm, nurturing environment in which writers are encouraged to express themselves, release their creative energies without fear, and see what happens. Some have a political agenda--feminist art, black art, social protest art. Some have an aesthetic agenda--minimalism, realism, metafiction, etc. There are writer workshops specializing in horror fiction, detective fiction, children's fiction, science fiction, and so on.

There are workshops that have almost nothing to do with writing, where the texts are little more than an excuse for primal scream catharsis on one hand or new age channeling on the other. So it follows that in talking about a writer's workshop it must be made clear just whose workshop is under discussion.

Biography is a vain and foolhardy undertaking. Its essential conceit, that the unimaginable distance between two human beings can be crossed, is unsupportable; each of us is inherently unknowable. The biographer may be able to locate his subject in place and time--to describe the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the jobs he had, the opinions he expressed--but that subject's inner essence is, by its very nature, forever inaccessible.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

On Saturday November 15, 2014, workers at a DHL office in Thailand's Pathum Thani province noticed something gruesome while scanning packages destined for the U.S. The discovery caused a DHL manager to notify the Royal Thai Police.

Inside five plastic boxes officers discovered an infant's head, a baby's left foot sliced into three pieces, an adult heart, and patches of human skin.

Thai investigators questioned Ryan Edward McPherson and Daniel Jamon Tanner, the Americans who had tried to ship the body parts out of the country. The men claimed to have purchased the body parts at a flea market for $100. The idea was, they said, to shock their friends back home.

Notwithstanding the fact McPherson and Tanner could not remember the location of the flea market, the Thai authorities, unsure if these men had broken any laws, released them without criminal charges. The men said they were headed to Cambodia.

On Monday November 17, 2014, Thai detectives determined that the infant body parts had been stolen from the Siriraj Medical Museum within Bangkok's Sirira Hospital. The items had been taken from the forensic medicine section of the museum.

Closed-circuit camera footage from the hospital showed that McPherson and Tanner had visited the institution on the day the body parts went missing. A Thai judge, that Monday, approved arrest warrants for the two Americans on charges of theft from a government hospital. If convicted as charged, McPherson and Tanner could be locked up abroad for up to seven years.

In Thailand, infant body parts are purchased on the black market by people who believe they possess the power of black magic. Believers make these macabre acquisitions for protection, good luck, and success in business. In this case, the stolen body parts brought McPherson and Tanner no protection and plenty of bad luck.

A few first novelists rush to quit their day jobs, especially if they manage to swing a large advance. It is accepted industry wisdom that getting big money up front means that one's publisher will be forced to work hard to earn it back. Sounds logical, but it isn't necessarily so. Even with massive support, a certain number of books are bound to fail. It also happens that publishers blow off high advances.

Neurologists have found that changes in a specific area of the brain can produce hypergraphia--the medical term for an overpowering desire to write. Thinking in a counterintuitive, neurological way about what drives and frustrates literary creation can suggest new treatments for hypergraphia's more common and tormenting opposite, writer's block. Both conditions arise from complicated abnormalities of the basic biological drive to communicate.

There are many reasons I can't write about a true crime case. Sometimes, (1) there isn't enough there to fill a full-length book; (2) the characters are just not interesting; (3) the case has been over-publicized; (4) the story is too sad; or (5) the timing of a case may be wrong because I am already attending other trials or writing other books…I have to wait until an arrest has been made and a case is headed for trial. From there on it's a gamble; if the defendant should be acquitted, I probably couldn't write the book.

A middle school math teacher in New Mexico waved a large knife at two students who were talking too much during a pop quiz. The incident happened on Friday November 14, 2014 at Bernalillo Middle School in Bernalillo, a small suburb 20 miles north of Albuquerque…The teacher, Benjamin Nagurski, had the knife out in the classroom to dig out staples from a bulletin board. He approached the two students who were chatting during the pop quiz.

"Stop talking," Nagurski, 63 said while holding the knife about four feet from the students. "Maybe next time I'll pull a machete on you," the teacher later told one of the boys... The students sent a text message to his parents after the incident.

Nagurski insisted that he had made the machete comment in jest…

In the complaint filed with local police, one of the students said he felt "unsafe" and "scared." The school district superintendent assured parents that the children were never in harms way…

Police officers booked Nagurski into jail on charges of unlawfully carrying a deadly weapon on school premises and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The teacher posted his $10,000 bond and was released. He was placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the case.

Mass murderer Charles Manson plans to marry a 26-year-old woman who left her midwestern home and spent the past nine years trying to help exonerate him. Afton Elaine Burton, the raven-haired bride-to-be, said she loves the man convicted in the notorious murders of seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate.

No date has been set, but a wedding coordinator has been assigned by the prison to handle the nuptials, and the couple has until early February to get married before they would have to reapply…Burton, who goes by the name "Star," told the Associated Press that she and Manson will be married next month. "Y'all can know that it's true," she said. "It's going to happen. I love him," she added. "I'm with him. There's all kinds of things."

However, as a life prisoner with no parole date, Manson is not entitled to family visits, an euphemism for conjugal visits.

Sharon Tate's sister, Debra, who acts as a spokesperson for the families of Manson's victims, said the impending marriage is "ludicrous."

No science fiction novel in the fifties sold more than one hundred thousand copies. Science fiction itself was regarded with lack of interest or contempt outside of the genre walls. Its very audience was an unorganized constituency, much like audiences for contemporary men's magazines. They might like it, buy it, need it, but they were not in the main evangelical and those who were, simply increased the popular perception of science fiction as a strange field, incestuous and defensive. The genre made no impression up the academic/literary nexus which controls critical perception and audiences in this country.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Coming-of-age is a literary term to describe the passage from childhood to adulthood, from a state of innocence to a state of experience. Most writing about the teenage years is about coming-of-age, for that is the point of those years. We slip free of the protection and constraints of childhood and step into the vulnerability and freedom of adulthood, and we know it.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says a man killed by an oncoming train at a Bronx subway station had been pushed onto the tracks. A MTA spokesperson said it happened around 8:40 AM on Sunday November 16, 2014...

The 61-year-old man was hit by a southbound D train at the Grand Concourse and East 167th Street station. The police are looking for a suspect…

The victim is Wai Kuen Kwork of the Bronx. There have been three other incidents in recent years that involved a person being pushed onto the tracks.

An illegal immigrant driving drunk and without a license crashed through a fence Sunday November 9, 2014 hitting and killing a 3-year-old girl as she was waiting in line for ice cream in Porterville, California. Adolf Balbuena, 18, mowed down the toddler, Angeles Moreno, as she and several others, including an 8-year-old boy, were waiting for an ice cream truck. After hitting Moreno, Balbuena backed up and drove away. He was arrested at his home around an hour later…

Balbuena…is an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Though the local district attorney is handling the case, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will ultimately decide whether he will be tried in the U.S. or deported back to Mexico….

An Idaho biology teacher is facing disciplinary action after killing and skinning a rabbit in class to show students where their food comes from.

The teacher killed the rabbit in front of 16 students by snapping its neck at Columbia High School in Boise. The rabbit was then skinned and cut up in front of the 10th graders. [Whether he intended it or not, this teacher probably turned 16 kids into vegetarians.]

Monday, November 17, 2014

At three-thirty in the morning of Saturday July 5, 2014, Pennsylvania State Trooper Frederick Schimp, with another officer in the police utility vehicle, ran a stop sign in Fairview Township just west of the lakeside city of Erie. The officers were not responding to an emergency.

A vehicle driven by 57-year-old Donna Platz from nearby Edinboro, Pennsylvania, plowed into the troopers' 2013 Ford Explorer. An hour later, the Erie County Coroner pronounced Donna Platz dead at the scene.

Members of the Fairview, Pennsylvania Fire Department cut the officers out of the badly damaged police vehicle. Trooper Schimp, 48, and his Troop E partner, 26-year-old Garrett Padasak, were taken to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Hamot Trauma Unit. After being treated for "moderate" injuries, the officers were released the next day.

The district attorney of Erie County declined to bring homicide charges against Trooper Schimp. While the officer's actions did violate the legal standard of due care, his behavior did not rise to the criminal standard of recklessness, a degree of negligence needed to justify a charge of homicide. (Reckless behavior involves a knowing disregard for the safety of others.)

The local prosecutor charged Trooper Schimp with careless driving, a summary offense that imposes a six-month driver's license suspension in cases involving fatalities.

On November 14, 2014, at a summary trial before Judge Paul Manzi, Trooper Schimp pleaded guilty to carless driving. The conviction placed the officer in danger of losing his job. Because he was just two years shy of the state police retirement age, termination had an enormous impact on this officer's life.

Pending the results of an internal inquiry into the fatal accident, Trooper Schimp was placed on paid administrative leave.

Regardless of whether or not Trooper Schimp remains on the force, the state of Pennsylvania and this officer can expect a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Donna Platz's family. This case is not over.

A Glendale, Arizona man walking down a street fully engulfed in flames Thursday evening November 13, 2014 was taken to Maricopa Medical Center with burns over 80 percent of his body…Bystanders attempted to help the man, one of them using a fire extinguisher to put out the flames…

"The weird thing was, he wasn't making a sound," said Lindsay Riedlinger, manager at the Arby's Restaurant near where the man was walking. "By the time I got there, he was silent." Someone had run into the restaurant screaming about a fire and asking for an extinguisher, she said. Riedlinger, 24, grabbed the extinguisher and went outside. By that time the man was surrounded by eight or nine people…"I aimed and put out the places on fire on his body," Riedlinger said. "The flames took everything. It looked like on his shoulders, his shirt was singed into his skin. He didn't know what was happening. After I put him out, he walked away and went into the Taco Bell. He said he just wanted water."

Taco Bell employees called 911 and paramedics took the man to the county burn center in extremely critical condition. The man would not tell officials how the fire started….

"Man Survives After Being Found Engulfed in Flames in Street," The Arizona Republic, November 14, 2014

Dancers at a strip club are due more than $10 million in back wages and tips, a federal judge in New York City ruled on November 14, 2014 after the dancers sued to be paid at least a minimum wage. And additional claims are headed for trial in the class action case, meaning there ultimately could be further awards to roughly 1,900 women who worked at Rick's Cabaret in Manhattan between 2005 and 2012…

The dancers got no steady wages, instead paying a fee to the club to perform there and in return getting paid by customers. The customers put up $20 for each personal dance and fees starting at $100 for 15 minutes of entertainment in semi-private rooms. But after paying club fees and required tips to deejays and other club workers, the dancers sometimes ended up in the red…

According to the plaintiffs' attorney E. Michelle Drake, "there is a real mythology of the wealthy stripper who has made piles of money. People see all the money that the customers give to the dancers. What they don't see is all the money going back from the entertainer to the club."

The club argued that the dancers were independent contractors. Club lawyers said the wages due to the strippers should be offset by the money they made from customers, called performance fees….

"Court Awards New York Strippers $10 Million in Back Wages," Fox News, November 16, 2014

It's fair to say that not many writers' works and reputations survive for more than a generation or two. In a practical sense, writers in this country generally survive after their books--that is they stay in print--because they are taught in the classroom. Moreover, short books, like small dogs, live longer: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Hemingway's In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises are taught more frequently than Tender is the Night and For Whom the Bell Tolls, not necessarily because they are better but because shorter books are easier to get students to read and to teach.

The 1960s were when the demise of fiction became something to crow about. Philip Roth told us that life in America had become so barbaric and bizarre that no fiction could hold a candle to the grotesque truth. Truman Capote allowed as how he had invented a new kind of narrative treat, the nonfiction novel, that made the un-non kind as obsolete as hand-churned ice cream. Tom Wolfe let us know that his new journalism was zippier, grabbier, funnier, wilder, and truer-to-life than any old wistful bit of fiction published, say, by those tiny giants over at The New Yorker.
John Updike in Handbook of Short Story Writing, Jean M. Fredette, editor, 1988

Sunday, November 16, 2014

I find the possibility of life as a fiction writer horribly depressing. Nonfiction, meaning journalism, essays, scholarly work, etc. is far more important to me because I am attempting to have an actual impact on the culture, on politics, and on ideas in people's heads. Nonfiction provides a more direct line to all of those things than fiction, which is too often used as an escape or to console people about their lives. Oh, and nonfiction pays much better.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Josh Shaw's fellow football players, just prior to the University of California's opening game of the 2014 season, voted the fifth-year senior cornerback captain of the team. Trogans fans, when they checked the team's website on Monday August 25, 2014, read that the 22-year-old star, over the weekend, had suffered two high ankle sprains that would sideline him for the year. The injuries, however, were not football related.

Shaw's online account of how he hurt himself comprised a compelling story. On Saturday night, August 23, while attending a family get together in Palmdale, California, he jumped from a second-story balcony when he saw his 7-year-old nephew struggling in the swimming pool. To save the boy he knew couldn't swim, Shaw leaped off the balcony, landing onto the concrete below. In severe pain, he crawled to the pool where he saved the child. That selfless act of heroism had cost him his final football season at USC.

Not long after the website posting, doubts surfaced regarding the validity of Shaw's story. Too many things just didn't add up. For one, on Saturday August 23, it seemed the football star wasn't anywhere near Palmdale.

On Tuesday afternoon, August 26, Lieutenant Andy Neiman with the Los Angeles Police Department released a statement that laid waste to Shaw's tale of heroism.

In downtown Los Angeles that Saturday night, officers responded to reports of a woman screaming from the third floor of an apartment complex. Someone had entered her dwelling by prying open a window facing a balcony. According to the woman, the intruder fled the apartment and jumped off the landing. During the questioning of this victim, the name Joshua Shaw came up. Apparently the victim and the football player had some kind of relationship. He also lived in the complex. Several witnesses saw a man at the apartment complex that night that matched Shaw's description. (A husky black man with dreadlocks.)

On Wednesday August 27, 2014, Josh Shaw confessed to coach Steve Sarkisian and other USC officials that he had not injured his ankles by jumping off a balcony in Palmdale to save his nephew. Coach Sarkisian suspended Shaw from the football team.

In a written statement released by Josh Shaw's attorney, Donald Etra, the football player said, "On Saturday August 23, 2014, I injured myself in a fall. I made up a story about this fall that was untrue. I was wrong not to tell the truth. I apologize to USC for this action on my part."

Other than to say the injuries were caused by a fall from the downtown apartment complex, neither Shaw nor his attorney explained what he was doing at the time or what had caused the "fall."

In his statement to the media, coach Sarkisian said, "We are extremely disappointed in Josh. He let us all down…I appreciate that Josh has admitted that he lied and has apologized. Although this type of behavior is out of character for Josh, it is unacceptable. Honesty and integrity must be at the center of our program. I believe Josh will learn from this."

Perhaps. But in all probability Mr. Shaw came clean when it became obvious that his elaborate lie wouldn't hold water.

On November 12, 2014, Josh Shaw spoke publicly for the first time about the scandal that ended his football career at USC. To a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, he said, "I've seen the dark side, I've hit the bottom. I've learned."

Shaw admitted jumping off the balcony following an argument with his girlfriend. "We just got into an argument just like every couple does. Was it loud? Yes. Was it overly loud? I don't think so." (What is overly loud?)

"We were not on good terms when she left," Shaw continued. "I thought she had somebody call the authorities. I was thinking the worst. If she did say anything, I'm a black man with dreadlocks, and with everything going on in the country at the time, all that stuff in Ferguson, Missouri in my mind, I'm going to leap from the balcony so the authorities didn't see me."

If I may, I'm going to leap to the following conclusion: The Ferguson excuse is a load of crap. Shaw was up to no good and he wanted to get out of that apartment. Ferguson, Missouri? Does he think we are stupid?

It is not hard to write funny stuff. All you have to do is procure a pen and paper, and some ink, and then sit down and write it as it occurs to you. The writing is not hard, but the occurring--that, my friend, is the difficulty.

Though still revered, the classic text, The Elements of Style [by Will Strunk and E.B. White] is a little dated now, and just plain wrong about some things. Strunk and White are famously clueless for example, about what constitutes the passive voice. Their book also has some of the hectoring, preachy tone that creeps into so many of the discussions about writing, though it's not as extreme as Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which declares that people who misuse apostrophes "deserve to be struck by lightening, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."

Charles McGrath, "Omit Needless Rules," The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 2014

The search in New York City continues for two men who robbed a Manhattan jewelry store at gunpoint on November 11, 2014…The two men robbed the store in the middle of the afternoon. Police responded to the scene in force, sweeping the building looking for suspects…"All of a sudden we saw the SWAT team and all the cops outside the building," one witness said. Diamond district workers and shoppers say they got the scare of their lives…

Investigators say just before 2:30 PM, two men posing as deliverymen buzzed for entrance into the Watch Standard Jewel Store saying they had some letters…"Suspect number one pulled out a firearm and demanded that the store empty out the safe and place the jewelry inside a bag," Deputy Chief William Aubrey said...

The four employees inside the eighth floor wholesale and retail store complied but yelled for the owner to call 911. The first suspect then whipped the 56-year-old owner, leaving him with a minor injury while the second suspect waited in the hall…

The first suspect had a black shoulder bag with a letter K in a blue circle. The second suspect was wearing black True Religion jeans. Police haven't revealed how much jewelry the robbers walked off with.

Ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.

Friday, November 14, 2014

A 2-year-old girl was found Thursday November 6, 2014 in the woods wrapped in a blanket. She had wandered away from her home 22 hours earlier. Brooklyn Lynn Lilly wandered off while playing outside her Tawas City, Michigan home in the eastern part of the state near Lake Huron. Her neighbors and family had feared the worst. "We worried that maybe somebody came and grabbed her, family friend Patrick McDonald said…

State Trooper Denis McGuckin and his dog Jax found Brooklyn…"She lifted her head up off the ground and looked back toward me and my dog and smiled," McGuckin said. "She said, 'I love the woods.' "

"Toddler Who Spent 22 Hours Alone in the Woods Found Safe," ABC News, November 7, 2014

Miguel Mejia Ramos, a 45-year-old New York City man, has been sentenced to 45 years in prison for fatally stabbing his sleeping wife in a rage triggered by jealousy and then killing their two toddlers. Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown says Mejia-Ramos was sentenced Friday November 7, 2014. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter last month for the January 2014 killings. [Why did they let him plead to such a lesser offense? In places like Texas, killing three people will get you the death sentence.]

Majia-Ramos told police officers he snapped after drinking and finding a photo on his wife's phone of her with another man. [Okay, but how does this explain the killing of the children?] He grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed 21-year-old Daisy Garcia and their daughters ages one and two. Police arrested him near Schulenburg, Texas. He was trying to flee to Mexico.

"NYC Man Gets 45 Years For Stabbing His Wife and 2 Toddlers to Death," Associated Press, November 7, 2014

A basic distinction between an episode in real life and a short story is that the story does have an author, who creates his characters, selects his actions, and directs them in the exploration of some meaningful idea. Any episode in life is filled with irrelevancies of many kinds which confuse our understanding; in the story only those elements are included which serve to focus the overall effect, which is the story. The helpful author is present, then, in the creating, selecting, and focusing of the materials of his story.

Humor is difficult. Other kinds of stories don't have to hit the bull's-eye. The outer rings have their rewards too. A story can be fairly suspenseful, moderately romantic, somewhat terrifying, and so on. This is not the case with humor. A story is either funny or it is not funny. Nothing in between. The humor target contains only a bull's-eye.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Special Agent Robert Lustyik, a 48-year-old assigned to the FBI resident agency in White Plains, New York, was under investigation by various federal agencies for soliciting bribes from a native of Bangladesh named Rizve Ahmed. Agent Lustyik and his lifelong friend, Johannes Thaler, a ladies shoe salesman from Tarrytown, Connecticut, were suspected of selling FBI data to Ahmed. The information pertained to a political opponent of Ahmed's in Bangladesh, material Ahmed could use to harm his rival. Federal authorities believed agent Lustyik's and his accomplice's scheme unfolded between September 2011 through March 2012.

Federal investigators had acquired a series of text messages between Lustyik and Thaler discussing how to pressure Ahmed, a resident of Danbury, Connecticut, into paying them the maximum amount of money for the information taken from confidential FBI files. In one such message, Lustyik wrote: "We need to push Ahmed for this meeting and get that $40,000 quick…I will talk us into getting the cash…I will work my magic. We are so close."

In a text message to his FBI friend, Thaler replied: "I know. It's all right there in front of us. Pretty soon we'll be having lunch in our oceanfront restaurant."

The FBI agent's scheme threatened to unravel in January 2012 when Lustyik learned that Ahmed was considering using another source for the information he wanted. In a text message to Thaler, Lustyik wrote: "I want to kill him [Ahmed]…I'm pissed…I will put a wire on and get Ahmed and his associates to admit they want a Bangladeshi political figure offed [murdered]…We'll sell that information to him [Ahmed]."

According to their scheme, the FBI agent and his accomplice hoped to secure, from Ahmed, a $40,000 "retainer"and monthly payments of $30,000. Only $1,000 in bribe money had actually exchanged hands.

Besides the Bangladesh scheme, the criminally industrious FBI agent and his co-conspirator had another illegal iron in the fire. In a separate, parallel case, Lustyik and Thaler stood accused of using the agent's access to FBI data to thwart a federal investigation into military contract fraud involving a Utah-based company formed by former U.S. soldiers. The company's head, Michael Taylor, was charged in 2011 with using inside information to win inflated government contracts worth $54 million. The contracts were intended to supply weapons to Afghan troops.

Agent Lustyik, in exchange for millions of dollars, offered to make Michael Taylor look like a valuable counterintelligence source by creating a dossier of fake interviews with former agents and prosecutors. In a text message to Taylor, Lustyik wrote: "I will not stop in my attempt to sway this [investigation] your way." Johannes Thaler's role in the scene involved acting as a messenger between Lustyyik and Taylor.

Unfortunately for Special Agent Lustyik, Taylor and two of his employees pleaded guilty to the defense contract scheme in late 2011. A few months later, when he turned 50, Lustyik retired from the FBI.

FBI agents, on August 2, 2013, arrested Lustyik and Thaler for their roles in the Bangladesh bribery case. They were charged with conspiracy to bribe a public official and soliciting and receiving bribes. Lustyik was also charged with disclosing the contents of a FBI Suspicious Activity Report. Lustyik and Thaler posted their bonds and were released from custody to await their trials. If convicted, they faced up to 25 years in prison.

Michael Taylor, in December 2013, after spending 14 months in federal custody in Utah, gained his freedom by cutting a deal with federal prosecutors in the cases against Lustyik and Thaler. At this point the focus of the federal investigators was on the ex-FBI agent and his friend.

On September 30, 2014, the former FBI agent pleaded guilty in a Salt Lake City federal courtroom to attempting to derail the investigation into Michael Taylor's defense contract case. Lustyik's lawyer, in speaking to reporters, said that his client would not make a deal to cooperate with federal prosecutors. He would not testify against his friend, Johannes Thaler.

Johannes Thaler, 51, and Rizve Ahmed, 35, on October 17, 2014, pleaded guilty in a White Plains, New York federal court to bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the Bangladesh case. Lustyik's trial on these bribery charges is scheduled for November 2014.

Jack London's writing routine was the single unchanging element of his relatively brief adult life. [1876-1916] From the age of 22 to his death at 40, he wrote a thousand words every day, a quota he filled as a rule between 9 and 11 AM. He slept for five hours a night, which left him with 17 hours of free time. But in his writing hours he was prolific: he produced short stories, poetry, plays, reportage, "hackwork" and novels, many of them bestsellers. In 18 years, he published more than fifty books. "I'd rather win a water fight in the swimming pool," he said, "than write the great American novel."

A Duncanville, Texas teacher has been "suspended without pay pending discharge" after accusations that she sent racially charged tweets about the incidents in Ferguson, Missouri…Vinita Hegwood, a high school English teacher at Duncanville High School near Dallas, allegedly sent the tweets from her personal Twitter account on November 7, 2014. "Who (expletive) made you dumb (expletive) crackers think I give a squat (expletive) about your opinions? #Ferguson kill yourselves," read one of the messages.

Later that evening another Hegwood tweet appeared, saying: "You exhibit nigga behavior, I'm a call you a nigga. You acting crackerish, I'm a call you a cracker." Hegwood is African-American…

It's not clear exactly to what or whom the teacher was referring, but the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, have often hinged on race…A grand jury is expected to decide soon whether Officer Darren Wilson will face charges.

Hegwood is in her second year at Duncanville High School, where she maintained a website for her students…The Twitter account from which she allegedly made the comments has since been taken down…

Lari Barager, Duncanville Independent School District spokesperson, called the messages "offensive" and "reprehensible" and stressed the tweets do not represent the 240 other teachers at Duncanville High School…

The board of trustees for the school district will decide Hegwood's fate at its next meeting.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Perhaps the most polarizing book written for children is The Rainbow Fish, by Marcus Pfister. To its fans, it's a sparkling illustrated story about a beautiful but arrogant fish who learns humility by giving away its shiny scales to less fortunate fish. To detractors, it's a socialist screed that encourages "an attitude of greed and entitlement," as one customer wrote in a review on Amazon.com.

John Williams "Books to Love and Hate," The New York Times Book Review, October 5, 2014

Writing funny pieces is a legitimate form of activity, but the durable humor in literature, I suspect, is not the contrived humor of a comedian commenting on the news but the sly and amost imperceptible ingredient that sometimes gets into writing. I think of Jane Austen, a deeply humorous woman. I think of Thoreau, a man of some humor along with his bile.

E.B. White in Writers at Work, Eighth Series, edited by George Plimpton, 1988

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The novelist can slowly unfold the changing lives of several characters, but the short story writer has difficulty enough in making credible the change in a single character. Any intelligent reader has a very reasonable skepticism about sudden spiritual or moral change; the author most prove to the reader that this character was well on the way toward the change before it actually takes place. Doing this takes up much of an author's story.

Now that I had written one novel and they, the actual readers and the critics who had read it, were looking for a second, I was up against it. I was not up against it in the way I dreaded, I was up against it cold and hard as one comes up against a wall. I was a writer. I had made the writer's life my life; there was no going back; I had to go on. What could I do? After the first book there had to be a second book. What was the second book to be about? Where would it come from?

Phil Rudd, the drummer for the legendary hard rock band AC/DC, has been charged with attempting to have two men killed. The 60-year-old appeared in a New Zealand court Thursday November 6, 2014 facing a count of attempting to procure the murders…He was also charged with threatening to kill, possession of methamphetamine, and possession of cannabis…

Rudd entered a no plea to the charges at the Tauranga District Court, and was bailed out until November 27, 2014…The Australian-born drummer moved to New Zealand in 1983 after being sacked by the group. He rejoined the group years later…[On November 7, 2014, the New Zealand prosecutor dropped the murder-for-hire charge against Rudd.]

"AC/DC Drummer Phil Rudd Charged with Attempting to Have Two Men Murdered," CNN, November 6, 2014

Novels of Manners emphasize social customs, manners, conventions and mores of a definite social class. Such novels are always realistic, and sometimes they are satiric and comic, as in Henry Fielding's or Jane Austen's work.

Monday, November 10, 2014

A Utah stepfather foiled an attempt to kidnap his young daughter from her bed early Friday November 7, 2014 after confronting a man carrying her across the lawn. The 5-year-old girl wasn't hurt…

The suspect entered the home through an unlocked door or window about 4:30 AM in Sandy, a middle-class suburb of Salt Lake City…The intruder was in the family's basement searching through things when he came upon the girl sleeping in her bedroom. The suspect took her out of bed and carried her upstairs, making noises that woke the parents.

The girl's stepfather went to the door and saw the man carrying his stepdaughter on the front lawn. He ran outside and confronted the man, wrestling her free of the abductor. The suspect fled, and the stepfather called 911.

Officers set up a perimeter, and with the help of police dogs, launched a search. The suspect went into a second home, where the residents heard him and called the police.

Police captured the 46-year-old man outside the second home thanks to a police dog that bit the suspect in the upper shoulder…The family told the police that they had never seen and don't know the suspect, who police have identified as Troy Morley of Roy, Utah…

Morley was taken to a nearby hospital to receive treatment for the dog bite. He was arrested later in the day and booked into jail on charges of child kidnapping and burglary….

On September 5, 2014, Stacey Addison, an American veterinarian from Oregon who had been traveling solo around the world since January 2013, traveled from Indonesia into Timor-Leste (also known as East Timor) and shared a cab from the border crossing at Batugade to the capital city of Dili. Along the way, another passenger asked to pick up a package at a DHL office…Police, acting on a tip from Indonesian authorities, were watching and found methamphetamine in the parcel.

Addison and everyone in the cab were arrested. She was held in the Dili Detention Center for four nights then released after an initial hearing…The judge ordered that her passport be held by the authorities until the investigation was completed. Addison was released on September 9, 2014 but wasn't allowed to leave the country…The prosecutor told her that she was needed as a witness for an investigation that could take a year.

After an October 29, 2014 court appearance, Addison was jailed again without explanation or warning, and spent five days in solitary confinement. It's unclear when she will be released….

Sunday, November 9, 2014

A trade group which represents some 1,400 for-profit colleges and universities sued in federal court on November 6, 2014 to force the U.S. Department of Education to rescind regulations designed to prevent the schools from taking billions in federal aid if they stick students with thousands of dollars in loan debt in return for unmarketable, dead-end degrees.

Mainly at issue is a federal regulation called the "gainful employment rule." The rule compares graduate job earnings to their debt payments…Schools run afoul of the regulation if graduates can't get jobs which pay enough so that loan payments don't exceed 8 percent of their total annual earnings or 20 percent of their discretionary income.

For-profit schools rely heavily on federal cash and their chief executive officers bring home obscenely high salaries. For example, the CEO and president of Devry Education Group, Daniel Hamburger, made $5,680,939 in 2013. Edward H. West, president and CEO of Education Management Corporation, made $6,025,304 in 2013. Scott W. Steffy, president and CEO of Career Education Corporation, made $4,837,992 that year…

Career Education Corporation, reached a $10 million settlement agreement in 2013 with the New York attorney general over charges of gross deception. The…company admitted that only 24 percent to 64 percent of graduates were able to find meaningful jobs. The company had touted an inflated rate of 55 percent to 80 percent…

For-profit schools in the United States currently enroll about 2 million student.

A 26-year-old Brockton, Massachusetts man turned himself in Friday night November 7, 2014 after Boston Transit Police released his surveillance photo as the suspect they believe stole the cellphone off a woman struck and killed by a Red Line train the day before…He is to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court…

The well-dressed young man still possessed the dead woman's phone and turned it in. The Transit Police had released the surveillance video that showed the suspect walking toward the phone, which had a distinct orange case. He covered it with his foot, then picked it up.

The woman was struck and killed at 9:48 PM Thursday November 6, 2014 at the Downtown Crossing Station.

"Man Wanted in Theft of Woman's Phone Turns Himself In," The Boston Globe, November 8, 2014

Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you're thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.

Flashbacks are not designed for the writer's amusement, but rather the reader's education. If your flashback is not going to elucidate, illuminate, or provide context, then you probably don't need it.

It is also advisable not to use a flashback in a novel-length manuscript when you only have one or two flashbacks to insert. You're better off setting up a pattern of at least half a dozen flashbacks at fairly regular intervals, rather than taking one or two lonely excursions into the past. If there are only two flashbacks, the reader will be jarred by the digressions and they will stand out as an abnormality.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Gary Fellenbaum, a 21-year-old Wal-Mart employee, lived with his estranged wife Amber and their 11-month-old daughter in a mobile home in West Cain Township outside Coatesville, Pennsylvania 35 miles northwest of Philadelphia. In mid-October 2014, not long after meeting 31-year-old Jilliam Tait, a fellow Wal-Mart employee, Fellenbaum agreed to let her and her two children--Ryan McMillan, 6 and 3-year-old Scotty McMillan--move in with him and his 21-year-old estranged wife.

Not long after Tait and her sons took up residence in the mobile home, the 270-pound Fellenbaum began to physically abuse her sons. Jilliam Tait immediately became a willing participant in the beatings.

The physical abuse of 3-year-old Scotty intensified during a three-day period beginning on November 2, 2014. The couple repeatedly beat the boy with their fists, a homemade whip, a curtain rod, and an aluminum strip. They smashed his head through a wall, punched him in the face and stomach, and hanged him upside down by his feet while they hit him. At one point during a torture session, the couple thought if funny when the child tried to free himself.

On Tuesday morning, November 4, 2014, Fellenbaum taped Scotty to a chair and beat him for refusing to eat his toast. That afternoon, after being beaten throughout the day, Scotty lost consciousness. His torturers, in an effort to wake him up, laid him in a shower stall and ran water on him for thirty minutes. Still unresponsive, they placed his body on an un-inflated air mattress.

Later that afternoon, Fellenbaum and Tait left the unresponsive child in the mobile home while they went shopping for a car. They returned to the dwelling with pizza, had dinner, engaged in sex, then took a nap. When Tait awoke at seven-thirty that evening, she checked on Scotty. When she couldn't revive the toddler, she asked Amber Fellenbaum to call 911.

Paramedics couldn't revive the boy either. After doctors at a nearby hospital pronounced him dead, they called the authorities. When hardened emergency room nurses saw the horribly bruised and swollen child, they wept.

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan charged Gary Fellenbaum and Jilliam Tait with first-degree mruder, aggravated assault, endangering the welfare of a child, and reckless endangerment. The judge denied the couple bail. (Under Pennsylvania law, murder preceded by torture is a death penalty offense.)

Amber Fellenbaum admitted being aware of the abuse for two weeks prior to Scotty McMillan's death. She said she first knew there was a problem when she saw her estranged husband beat the boy with a frying pan. The district attorney charged her with child endangerment for not reporting the abuse. The judge set her bail at $500,000.

Six-year-old Ryan McMillan was placed into the care of a relative. County child services personnel took custody of the 11-month-old Fellenbaum baby.

Detectives questioned Ryan McMillan's teachers at his Coatesville area elementary school to determine if anyone there had noticed his injuries. Records indicated that he had been absent the past two weeks.

Some of the American writers are said--particularly by European and British critics--to be one-book writers. They produce one good novel and never again produce anything to equal it, apparently because their first book was so heavily autobiographical.

Ignoring the hot MFA [Masters of Fine Arts] grad you read about in Publishers Weekly whose novel starts a big publishing house bidding war, literary first novels are almost impossible to introduce into the marketplace. Bookstores will only order them in small quantities, if at all, and it is difficult to get reviews, especially in places that really matter. Additionally, getting a bookstore reading for a first fiction author is an effort that would make Sisyphus proud. A well-established independent bookseller once told me flat out that he would never book a first fiction author into his store.

Friday, November 7, 2014

On November 3, 2014, classes at Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Richmond, Washington were canceled after a two-liter bottle exploded in the parking lot, injuring a bus driver…The explosion happened at eight in the morning. No students were on campus at the time of the incident.

Police Sergeant D. B. Gates said the bottle was filled with a volatile substance and exploded as the bus driver walked past it. The driver was hit by something that came out of the bottle. There is also a second adult who may have been exposed to fumes. Both were taken to a nearby hospital.

Nothing was found when the King County Police Bomb Squad swept the school. As a precaution, a nearby school was closed and another placed in a modified lockdown.

The term "purple prose" describes prose that is heightened, flowery, and overdone. The culprits of purple prose are usually modifiers that make your writing wordy, overwrought, distracting, and even silly. You might say that Hemingway's prose is the opposite of purple prose.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

On Sunday November 2, 2014, 90-year-old Arnold Abbott and two pastors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were charged with feeding the homeless in public. This was the city's first crackdown of its new ordinance banning public food sharing…According to Mr. Abbott, "an officer said, 'drop that plate now,' like I had a weapon."

Despite some criticism from homeless advocates, city officers have vowed that the new law will be enforced. "Just because of media attention we don't stop enforcing the law. We enforce the laws here in Fort Lauderdale," Major Jack Seller said. "I'm not satisfied with having a cycle of homeless in the city of Fort Lauderdale. Providing them with a meal and keeping them in that cycle on the street is not productive."

But Abbott, who has been helping feed homeless people in the area through his Love Thy Neighbor nonprofit since 1991, said the authorities are targeting the city's most vulnerable residents. "These are the poorest of the poor. They have nothing. They don't have a roof over their head," he said. "Who can turn them away?"…Abbott said the threat of jail won't stop him from doing it again.

A Radnor, Pennsylvania high school senior who had a "fascination" with the Columbine High School massacre of 15 years ago wrote about shooting "everyone in classrooms" and blowing up the cafeteria. "I would be the first female shooter," the student…wrote in her journal…"I'm homicidal and I'm fine with that."…

The student made references to killing a teacher, killing fellow students in a certain manner, and also injuring herself…"I want to trap them, pick them off one by one," the girl wrote. "Blow up the cafeteria, shoot everyone in the classrooms…Imagine the power, the bullets leaving the gun with a loud bang, piercing kids around me, the way they collapse, their blood splattering the floor--the screams."

The student, who will be charged on November 3, 2014 as a juvenile with making terroristic threats, has a history of treatment for "psychological issues." [If this girl ever gets straightened out, she should consider a career as a true crime writer.]

A man bursts spontaneously into flames. Disembodied voices speak. Something lurks behind the closet door. A victim of religious mania kills his wife and children. These episodes can be found in Wieland, or The Transformation, published in 1798. It is the first American horror novel, written by Charles B. Brockden Brown, a Philadelphian of Quaker stock who is recognized as the father of American literature. He was, in other words, the first American crazy enough to try to support himself solely by writing fiction.

Highly autobiographical first novels are out of fashion. Budding writers are expected to cast their eyes away from themselves. And yet in our culture of instant gratification and celebrity, a writer's reputation can depend almost exclusively on the critical reception of a first novel. The problem is twofold: we expect first novels to be works of non-autobiographical genius well before a writer has time to mature.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

On Sunday night, November 3, 2014, the Baltimore Ravens were in Pittsburgh to play the Steelers at Heinz Field. Stephen Sapp, a 29-year-old fan from Hazelwood, a Pittsburgh neighborhood on the northern bank of the Monongahela River, was in attendance. He would have been better off if he'd stayed home and watched the game on TV.

At some point during the event, stadium security officers were called to Gate C where an apparently intoxicated Sapp had become disorderly and loud. The security officers warned Mr. Sapp that if he didn't stop yelling and screaming they would have to ask him to leave the stadium. The out of control football fan said he had no intention of being ejected from the premises. That's when security called in the Pittsburgh police.

Upon the arrival of the Pittsburgh police, Stephen Sapp started kicking the steel dividing barriers. The officers warned him that if he didn't stop doing that, they would have to take him into custody. Mr. Sapp showed his contempt for authority by kicking another barrier that broke loose and hit Melissa Yancee in the forehead. The blow cut her face and knocked her unconscious.

The officers informed the drunken fan that they were taking him to jail. When they tried to handcuff the disorderly and now dangerous fan, he physically resisted. Sapp ended up on the ground with his hands tucked under his body in an effort to avoid the handcuffs. Following a brief struggle, the officers were able to free the arrestee's hands and apply the restraining device.

Because Sapp had sustained cuts during his scuffle with the police, the officers took him to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Mercy Hospital. While waiting to be treated for his minor injuries, Sapp said this to a police officer: "I know how this works. How much money will it take to make this go away and to let me go home today?"

The officer informed Mr. Sapp that he had just committed the crime of bribery. Seemingly devoid of good sense, the man in custody continued, "Look, I am an IRS agent and I can help you in other ways if you let me go home and make this go away."

Later that night, the officers showed Mr. Sapp how things work in Pittsburgh criminal justice. They booked him into the Allegheny County Jail on charges of aggravated assault, defiant trespass, resisting arrest, reckless endangerment, and bribery. The judge set his bond at $10,000.

Melissa Yancee, the woman injured as a result of Mr. Sapp's drunken Heinz Field antics, had been transported to Allegheny General Hospital for treatment of her head wounds.

The thing you are trying to find is the voice. This is the single most important thing in any novel. The voice. How it will sound. Who is telling the story? Why is he telling it? If you're sixty years old and writing in the first person singular about a sixteen-year-old high school student, beware of the voice. It may be your own, and that is wrong.

A 16-year-old boy has been imprisoned for life after being convicted of murdering a teacher in Leeds, England. Ann Maguire, 61, was attacked at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds in April 2014. She had worked at the school for more than 40 years and had been due to retire.

Speaking outside Leeds Crown Court, Chief Superintendent Paul Money described Mrs. Maguire's murder as a "cold-blooded, brutal and cowardly act." He said the boy's motive appeared to be an "inexplicable hatred of this teacher who was simply carrying out her duty."

I like the Randall Jarrell line: "A novel is a prose narration of some length that has something wrong with it." I think that's true. If you're going to write a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred thousand words, perfection is a fantasy.

The Great American Novel is as elusive as the Lock Ness monster…Mythical beasts, the both of them, but that won't stop us from setting up our telescopes and yardsticks, or from speculating: where will it surface?

The novelist has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb, and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. [Today it would be global warming, consumerism, terrorism, and flag-waving yahoos.] There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and the modern novel is born.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

A reputed former mob boss was ordered back to prison Friday October 24, 2014 for violating parole, and his lawyer complained that the FBI would pursue his client "to the grave." Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino, the reputed head of Philadelphia's La Cosa Nostra in the 1990s, must serve four additional months for failing to report a meeting with a former co-defendant at a Boca Raton, Florida cigar bar. "I never had dinner with Johnny Ciancaglini. I bumped into him," said Marlino on a return trip to Philadelphia. "I didn't report it…It just slipped my mind."

Merlino, 52, has been living in south Florida since 2011, when he left prison after more than a decade from a Philadelphia racketeering conviction. His lawyer maintains that Merlino plans to work as a maitre d' at a new Boca Raton restaurant that will bear his name…

The FBI has been tailing Merlino as part of a new, unspecified criminal probe, according to testimony from organized crime task force members. On the night of the cigar bar meeting in June 2014, five officers in five cars were on the surveillance detail. The FBI task force members, who feared they stood out among regulars as they sipped pricey drinks, said they observed Merlino talking with Ciancaglini and other felons in a glass-enclosed VIP section of a spot called Havana Nights.

"It's very obvious what is going on. This is a night on the town with his mob buddies," said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Troyer…Defense lawyer Edwin Jacobs Jr insists the contact was random and amounted to nothing more than "a couple minutes of chit chat."…

Although Merlino appears to be enjoying an enviable lifestyle, he reported having almost no income.

Tewana Sullivan, 50, was visiting her godfather in HUD housing in the Detroit suburb of Livonia when something went horribly wrong. It ended with 66-year-old Cheryl Livy dead and Sullivan in custody for her murder. Sullivan's godfather, Marvin Jones, said, "All of us were good friends and for something like this to happen, I just don't see it. It was such a shock that something like that would happen between two good friends…"

Sullivan stands accused of beating Livy to death with a crock-pot. Police say the women fought, though they don't know why. When asked if he was disappointed in his goddaughter, Mr. Jones replied, "I'm not really disappointed in her because nobody knows what happened. So why would I be disappointed in her?" After being informed of what police were alleging, Jones said, "The police might be saying that, but I don't see it that way. I see them being friends and something happened."

Derek Hunter, "Detroit: Woman Beats Friend to Death With a Crock-Pot," Daily Caller, October 28, 2014

Every scene in your novel must pertain to your plot. Every single one. Even if a character muses or meanders, that activity must be plot-related. A character under suspicion of murder may drift off into thought, but those thoughts had better be about why he's been wrongfully accused, how he's going to prove his innocence, or who the true murderer is, not random memories of whale-watching or hiking.

Monday, November 3, 2014

After transporting an inmate back to jail in Safford, Arizona, Jeremy Martin and Tai Chan, deputies with the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, checked into a hotel in Las Cruces.

Jeremy Martin, a 29-year-old with a wife and three children, had been on the force as a patrol officer for two and a half years. Tai Chan, 27, a member of the department's investigative bureau, had been a deputy three years. Both were considered hard working members of the sheriff's office.

On Monday October 29, 2014, after checking into the Hotel Encanto in Las Cruces, the deputies began drinking at Dublin's Pub. It was there the officers got into an argument. Just after midnight, the officers returned to the hotel room where the fight continued.

At one-thirty in the morning of October 30, a 911 caller from the hotel reported hearing six gunshots coming from the vicinity of the deputies' 7th floor room. When officers with the Las Cruces Police Department arrived at the hotel, they encountered Deputy Martin staggering out of a 7th floor elevator. The bleeding man had been shot in the back and arms.

Shortly after being shot several times, Jeremy Martin died at the Mountain View Regional Medical Center. Based on the physical evidence at the homicide scene, investigators believed the victim had been shot as he fled the hotel room.

Shortly after discovering the victim, police officers found Deputy Chan in a stairwell near the hotel roof. That's where they took him into custody on suspicion of murder.

Las Cruces officers booked Tai Chan into the Dona Ana County Jail on an open charge of murder. The judge denied him bond. The next day the sheriff of Santa Fe County announced that Tai Chan had been dismissed from the force.

The GE Mound Case

SWAT Madness and the Militarization of the American Police: A National Dilemma

"[A] powerful work . . . well researched . . . Recommended." Choice

LITERARY QUOTATIONS: GENRE

LITERARY QUOTATIONS: GENRE is a compilation of informative and entertaining quotes by writers, editors, critics, journalists, and literary agents on the subject of literary genre. The quotes also touch on the subjects of craft, creativity, publishing, and the writing life.

Contributors

A graduate of Westminster College (Pennsylvania) and Vanderbilt University Law School, I am the author of twelve non-fiction books on crime, criminal investigation, forensic science, policing, and writing. I have been nominated twice for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allen Poe Award in the Best Fact Crime Category. As a former FBI agent, criminal investigator, author, and professor of criminal justice at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, I have been interviewed numerous times on television and radio and for the print media.
For more information about me, please visit my web site at http://jimfisher.edinboro.edu.